Yizhak Rabin

Yitzhak Rabin: The General Who Signed the Peace

"We say to you today in a loud and clear voice; Enough of blood and tears. Enough!" The man who said that at the Oslo signing ceremony had, in 1948, put his name to the expulsion order for the Arab population of Lydda and Ramle, and in 1987 had instructed the Israeli army to use "force, might, and beatings" against Palestinian demonstrators. No leader of the twentieth century travelled further in public. It cost him his life.

The Boy Who Wanted to Be an Irrigation Engineer

Rabin was born on 1 March 1922 at the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, to Eastern European Jewish immigrants: Nehemiah Rubitzov, who had changed his name to Rabin, from Ukraine, and Rosa Cohen from Belarus. The family moved to Tel Aviv when he was one. His mother was a political activist who served on the Tel Aviv City Council. He studied at Beit Hinuch Leyaldei Ovdim from 1928 to 1935 and then at the Kadoorie Agricultural High School from 1937 to 1940, where he excelled at agriculture and disliked studying English. His ambition was to become an irrigation engineer. The Arab revolt of 1936–1939 turned him toward soldiering instead.

Palmach

He joined the Palmach commando force in 1941 under Yigal Allon's mentorship and first saw combat that summer in the Syria–Lebanon campaign, assisting Allied forces against the Vichy French. He commanded a platoon at Kfar Giladi in 1943. In October 1945 he planned the Palmach raid on the Atlit detainee camp that freed 208 Jewish illegal immigrants; he was arrested during Operation Agatha and held for five months.

In the 1948 war he commanded the Harel Brigade on the Jerusalem road, directed operations in Jerusalem and against Egyptian forces in the Negev, commanded IDF forces against the Irgun in the Altalena Affair, served as deputy commander of Operation Dani — the largest Israeli operation to that date — and signed the order expelling the Arab population of Lydda and Ramle. He was chief of operations on the Southern Front for Operations Yoav and Horev, and in January 1949 joined the Israeli delegation to the Rhodes armistice talks with Egypt.

Chief of Staff

He shaped IDF training doctrine through the 1950s, headed Northern Command from 1956 to 1959, led the Operations Directorate from 1959 to 1963, and in 1964 was appointed Chief of the General Staff by Levi Eshkol. Three years later he oversaw the Israeli victory of the Six-Day War against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. He was among the first to enter the captured Old City of Jerusalem and delivered a famous speech at Mount Scopus. He held the rank of Rav Aluf, lieutenant general, the most senior in the Israeli military. From 1968 to 1973 he served as ambassador to the United States, deepening the relationship and securing the lifting of the embargo on F-4 Phantom fighters.

First Premiership, and a Bank Account

Elected to the Knesset in January 1974 and made Minister of Labour that March under Golda Meir, he beat Shimon Peres 298 votes to 254 for the Labor leadership after her resignation and became prime minister on 3 June 1974. He signed the Sinai Interim Agreement with Egypt on 1 September 1975, declaring a commitment to peaceful resolution of the conflict, and in July 1976 ordered the Entebbe raid that rescued the passengers of a hijacked airliner held in Uganda.

His government fell over an absurdity. On 15 March 1977 the journalist Dan Margalit revealed that Rabin and his wife had kept an illegal joint dollar account in a Washington bank during his ambassadorship, in breach of Israeli currency regulations. Two accounts held $10,000. He resigned on 7 April; the Finance Ministry fined them 150,000 Israeli pounds.

The Bone Breaker

As Minister of Defense in the national unity governments from 1984 to 1990 he ordered the Israeli withdrawal in Lebanon to the "Security Zone," and on 4 August 1985 introduced the "Iron Fist" policy in the West Bank, reviving Mandate-era emergency legislation permitting detention without trial, house demolitions, newspaper closures and deportations. When the First Intifada broke out in December 1987 he initially underestimated it while abroad, then ordered troops to use "force, might, and beatings" against demonstrators — drawing international condemnation and the derogatory nickname "bone breaker." He was responsible for the 1988 assassination of Abu Jihad in Tunis, personally supervised the destruction of a Hezbollah stronghold at Meidoun, and in July 1989 planned the abduction of Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid from South Lebanon, after which Hezbollah announced the execution of the American UNIFIL officer Colonel Higgins.

Oslo

He took the Labor chairmanship from Peres in February 1992, won the June election decisively against Yitzhak Shamir's Likud, and formed the first Labor-led government in fifteen years on 13 July 1992. On 9 September 1993 he received a letter from Yasser Arafat renouncing violence and recognising Israel, and sent one the same day recognising the PLO. The Oslo Accords created the Palestinian National Authority with partial control over Gaza and the West Bank. A peace treaty with Jordan followed in 1994, and in October 1994 he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat and Peres.

Domestically he was equally consequential. He privatised extensively, moving Israel away from its socialised model; the 1993 Yozma programme offered tax incentives to foreign venture capital funds investing in Israeli high technology and helped make the country a global technology centre; the National Health Insurance Law of 1995 created universal healthcare. Doctors' wages rose 50 per cent, education spending 70 per cent, teachers' wages a fifth. He built the Cross-Israel Highway and expanded Ben Gurion Airport.

He was contemptuous of the opposition. He held his Knesset majority partly through non-coalition Arab support, said protesters could "spin around and around like propellers" as long as he had the numbers, and dismissed American Jewish objections to the peace plan as "chutzpah."

Why Yitzhak Is Called a Genius

The quality was not intellectual originality — he was an operations man, trained in movements and logistics, not a theorist. What he had was an unusually literal reading of risk, the kind soldiers acquire and politicians usually lose. He had run the 1967 war and the 1987 crackdown, and drew from both the conclusion most of his colleagues would not: that force had reached the limit of what it could deliver. His Nobel lecture of 10 December 1994 states the reasoning with no rhetoric at all: "Military cemeteries in every corner of the world are silent testimony to the failure of national leaders to sanctify human life." That is a general auditing his own profession. His authority to sign Oslo derived entirely from having been the most credible hawk in Israel; the biography was the argument.

The counter-case is heavy. He was blunt to the point of political incompetence — the propellers remark and the "chutzpah" dismissal helped inflame the domestic opposition that killed him. His record includes the Lydda and Ramle expulsion order, the Iron Fist, and the beatings policy, and no reading of Oslo erases them. He was brought down in 1977 by a $10,000 bank account, a lapse of ordinary prudence. And Oslo itself did not hold: Hamas and other factions launched suicide bombings against it from the start. He was the only figure who could have signed it, and that turned out not to be sufficient.

Shalom, Haver

On 4 November 1995, at a rally supporting the accords in Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv, Rabin told the crowd: "I always believed that most of the people want peace and are ready to take a risk for it." As he left, Yigal Amir, a law student and right-wing extremist opposed to Oslo, fired three shots. Two struck Rabin, who died on the operating table at Ichilov Hospital of blood loss and two punctured lungs. He was seventy-three, the first Israeli prime minister born in Palestine and the only one assassinated. Amir was convicted and sentenced to life.

The funeral on 6 November drew Bill Clinton, Hosni Mubarak, King Hussein of Jordan and Paul Keating; Clinton's Hebrew eulogy ended "Shalom, haver" — goodbye, friend. The Knesset made the 12th of Cheshvan a memorial day; Naomi Shemer translated Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" into Hebrew for it in 1996. The Yitzhak Rabin Centre was founded by act of the Knesset in 1997 to promote democracy and peace education, and the Mechinat Rabin preparatory programme followed in 1998. He received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award in 2005. Streets and squares carry his name in Berlin, Chicago, Madrid, New York and Odesa; parks in Montreal, Paris, Rome and Lima. The American diplomat Dennis Ross called him the most secular Jew he had met in Israel.